According to Wikipedia, In Scotland – 300 drams of the Famous Grouse are drunk every second. In the case above, we had a brisk drink after doing the ice-trek on the Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina…

As we rounded the last ice-corner on the ice-trek, we found a wooden table set up, with a number of cases of Famous Grouse Scotch whisky. Need ice? No problem, turn around and hack a chunk off the glacier and dump it in the ice-bowl. There’s even an ice-clear mini river of glacier water flowing through the ice in the background to wash the glasses.

Taken with a 45mm tilt shift lens which I focussed on the Famous Grouse bottle label. The ‘Est. 1800 Perth’ moulding in the bottle is also visible above the label. In the background, other hikers are also chilling after the ice-trek, still with their crampons on.

I have to admit it was the freshest ice I’ve ever had in a Scotch!

Canon EOS-5D Mark II
1/3200 sec at f/2.8
ISO 100
45mm

Related Posts:

Perito Moreno Glacier Trek
Moreno Glacier Tree, Argentina
The Maker’s Mark

MOO comes to the USA!

I’m a big fan of the MOO business cards – especially the ‘MiniCards’, in fact I did a previous post about the MOO MiniCards too…

So it’s good news to hear that they’ve just opened up a MOO US store. Located in Rhode Island, it sounds like good news for people wanting these little networking gems who live in the US (and a bunch of other countries benefit too by the looks of it).

1. Faster shipping (no more Royal Mail!)
2. Lower shipping costs
3. Ability to track the package

Every single time I’ve handed out one of their MiniCards to someone, they’ve commented about the card, and it’s been a conversation starter.

I usually upload hi-res files to my Flickr account, and make them private, and then import them into the MOO card making process straight from Flickr. I like the fact that I also have full control of the crop of the image in their card maker tool, and the zoom etc. Printing quality is excellent, and the size means you can keep double the amount of cards in any regular-size card holder!

Top Picture:

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/30 sec at f/2.8
ISO 200
70mm

Related posts:

MOO Cards

Someone was asking me the other day where I got my business cards from. They’re from a UK company called ‘Moo‘. That’s a picture of two cards above, in Sprite. Don’t ask…

I love the cards – they’re different (half the height of ‘regular’ business cards) and they’re not too expensive either. You can have your own pictures printed onto them (e.g. direct from flickr), and you can print as many different pictures as you want in a set (the one in the above pic is this one). Head over to the Minicards section at the Moo website for more info on them. They also deliver to international destinations.

So now more about the photo. I didn’t want to just take a picture of the cards themselves, so decided to sacrifice two of them (it actually landed up being a few more… oops) and put them in a glass of Sprite. To keep them in place, the card edges were gently pushed into the curve of the glass to ‘wedge’ them in place with a chopstick and a fondue fork. Then wait for a while for suitable bubbles to form (I learned a lot about bubble-forming – like when you first put something in there, it’s covered in tiny bubbles, but to get the more interesting ones, wait a little bit and they’ll start joining up or floating which gives a better random pattern with different size bubbles. I digress…). Then brushed away the bubbles from around the fish’s eyes and took the photo.

Actually one other thing that I used properly for the first time was Live View. It was the first ‘real’ time that I’ve used it, and it worked perfectly. I wanted the eye of the fish to be perfectly in focus, so using live view, and zooming into the eye then using manual focus worked perfectly.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/250 sec at f/8.0
ISO 200
50mm

Strobist info: Large umbrella directly above the glass, pointing down with a 580 EXII at 1/4 power. There was a second 580EXII at 1/32 power to the left of the glass and slightly above the height of the glass, which gave the the distorted ‘flame’ of light (if that’s what you’d call it) to the right of the glass.

The picture is pretty much straight out of the camera, with the exception of some cloning to get rid of my phone number on the card, and also adding the vignette.

Related Posts:

Moo Business Cards come to the USA!

A couple of weekends ago, I decided to sign up to a food photography workshop. I took the class soon after I did the grapes/wine bottle and barrel/whisky bottle shots, and knowing now what I’d learned during the class, I would have set up those shots differently. In my book that means the course was useful! I’d highly recommend the course to anyone interested in food photography – 8 hours that you won’t regret!…

The course was run by the ever-enthusiastic Lou Manna, and took us through ‘behind-the-scenes stories’ from some of his shots, before going into a more practical session where we each took turns to set up a food shot and try out different ideas. The class was really great, and although I think the above shot shows that my food styling skills need work (peppers in a shot glass????), I learned a lot from the class.

Another cool thing about the class was meeting the other participants… I think the furthest travelled participant was from Ecuador. Pretty cool. Another person attending was Hannah – at a young age, already very talented and has a book out called ‘My Sweet Vegan’. Not only does she do all the cooking part of the book/website, but also does the photography – a lot of which is fresh, and innovative! Take a look at her website here, and her blog here.

I’ll sign off with a setup shot of the picture above – at last I remembered to do one of these – I keep meaning to try and remember to do a setup shot for the in-the-kitchen shots I’ve done previously… One day… one day….

Main shot info: Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/125 sec at f/8.0
ISO 100
63mm

Strobist info: Two strobes at camera left and camera right. Left strobe in softbox, with the light feathered onto the food plate. Mirrors reflecting the light from the right hand strobe into the front and the left of the food plate. White seamless background.

Last post on the road-trip photos… Grapes in the Equus Run vineyard in Kentucky. Heard about the vineyard from the owner when she was in New Orleans, so thought it was only right to stop in on the way through Kentucky!…

On the right, one of the bottles about to be enjoyed – this one was the Cabernet Sauvignon.

Composite shot:

Grapes:
Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/160 sec at f/3.5
ISO 200
50mm

Bottle:
Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/3 sec at f/4.5
ISO 400
70mm+EF12 extension tube
Strobist info: Canon 580 EXII Fired into wrap-around reflector on the right hand side of the bottle and plant. Additional reflector board placed on camera left. Flash at 1/128 power.

A closeup of the Maker’s Mark bottle, and the wooden barrels. It is one of the few American made whiskeys to be spelled in the Scottish form ‘whisky’. Learn something new everyday!…

We showed up right at closing time, so the shot on the left was taken right before they closed the door to the tour area. They did let us roam around the grounds a little before leaving though, and they did switch on all the lights again for us to buy a sample.

The mark itself – ‘S IV’ actually shows that it’s the Samuels family (4th generation) that is currently in charge of the distilling process.

Composite shot:

Barrels:
Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/40 sec at f/1.2
ISO 3200
50mm

Bottle:
Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/4 sec at f/3.5
ISO 400
68mm+EF12 extension tube
Strobist info: Canon 580 EXII with snoot fired through the bottom of the bottle at 1/128 power.